“Hippocampus” was first published in Terror Tales of the Sea, edited by Paul Finch

Narration is by Peter Bishop, courtesy of Christopher C. Payne at Journalstone. JournalStone is a small press publishing company focusing on horror/science fiction/fantasy in the adult and young adult markets.

This story can be found in Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors. These terrors range from the speculative to supernatural horror, encompass the infernal and the occult, and include stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell.

Hasty for the Dark is the second short story collection from the award-winning and widely appreciated British writer of horror fiction, Adam L. G. Nevill. The author’s best horror stories from 2009 to 2015 are collected here for the first time.

I was intrigued by the idea of producing a horror story without characters: a relationship between the reader and an anonymous narrator, with the latter mimicking a roving camera. This roving point-of-view was, in effect, showing the reader a form of found footage: footage of a place in which something terrible had happened. All that was left for the reader was the aftermath and the evidence: the horrors. The reader becomes a witness at a crime scene; the horrors occurred before the story began. This creates a story that only the reader can piece together within their imagination. So instead of using characters as a vicarious medium, I would just show the reader the raw footage with no middle ground. I found this form could not sustain a story much beyond two thousand words and I chose for my subject a vast but derelict container ship. From our local shores and coastal paths, I watch these Leviathans cross the horizon all the time, on their way to Plymouth. Despite their size they have small crew complements. As a location for a horror story, and in my process of getting the sea and coast deeper within my imagination, a container ship was just the ticket.

Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents. Across vast, rolling waves the vessel ploughs, ungainly. Conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake, temporary cosmoses appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water, forged then sucked beneath the hull, or are sacrificed, fizzing, to the freezing night air.

On and on the great steel vessel wallops. Staggering up as if from soiled knees before another nauseating drop into a trough. There is no rest and the ship has no choice but to brace itself, dizzy and near breathless, over and over again, for the next great wave.

This was a very well done story. It was unexpected, though perhaps not as much so after the scrimshaw story, doing somewhat near the same thing.

Regardless, the "found footage" aspect of it was brilliant, but something that should be done only on rare occasion. The two stories so close together were a bit much.

Just please don't approach something like "Red Rubber Gloves", the episode that sticks with me as the only absolutely terrible Pseudopod I've ever heard. And not "terrible" as in a great horror story that sticks with one, but "terrible" as in "Who on Earth decided to run this, and what could they possibly have been thinking?"

I'll give Alisdair credit for quoting from The Soul Cages. That was a brilliant song and album both.

I doubt we could find many more examples TO run, so I think you're safe.

To answer your question: I was the one who decided to run (and hunted down the dead author's literary executor) "Red Rubber Gloves" and I still consider it one of my proudest moments on the show and one of the first episodes I point to when asked for a favorite. Not a story for everyone, obviously, but when have we ever promised that? C'est la vie!

Well then, I apologize if I upset or offended you. All the same, it really did stick with me that way, as just a "What even was this?"

I've been listening to the old Pseudopods I wrote a quick script to download, and for the most part, they're anything from reasonably decent to amazingly brilliant. And I've got nothing against listening to the ones that regard mental illness; I just finished listening to "Rule of Five" today, and that was exceptionally well done.

But at some point, something has to happen. The "Red Rubber Gloves" one just kept...repeating. And repeating. And repeating. And then it repeated some more and then it repeated again.

I suppose that could be someone's cup of tea, but I listen to Pseudopod to hear stories, not the same phrase endlessly repeated. I even listened to it a second time, since my mind rather tends to drift and I miss things, but it just...repeated. And repeated. And repeated, and repeated. Okay, I get it, red rubber gloves. MOVE ON. Okay...you're not moving on, are you?

I just listened to it again, and well, it was as bad as before. Way too repetitive, and too repetitive, and too repetitive, and this gets annoying, doesn't it? Well, that's the same there.

I take no offense. Despite the existence of various people's "standards for quality", the sad truth is that there are lots of different ways to do things and lots of different ways to enjoy things. In other words - not everything is for everyone (I myself have very little time for Disraeli, country music, most Charles Dickens, opera, etc.). Obviously, this work is not for you.

It's not often that an author writing in the experimental style of the "Nouveau Roman" produces work that coincides with the horror genre, and I thought our audience would be interested in experiencing something like that. I still think that, that's why I'm proud of it. And I think that the schematic/programmatic/blueprint style that writers in this genre use produced an interesting effect in audio (way back when we ran it - I was actually considering taking the source audio reading, isolating each sentence, and just repeating the repeated lines with the exact same reading, so as to further the "grid" effect that the text strives for. But that would have been too much time. And been crazy). And you've come away with the probable assurance that Christine Brooke-Rose (and almost certainly Alain Robbe-Grillet) are authors you can wipe off your "to read" list.